


The Trees Remember (but sometimes they forget)

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Dodgy Prophecies, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Minor Character, Pre-Canon, References to (Canonical) Incest, References to Rape/Non-Con, Remix, references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 09:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7568482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His dreams are full of faces. Some of them he knows and others he does not. But they are all the faces of war--its glory and its poison alike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Trees Remember (but sometimes they forget)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [originally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Trees Remember](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2553545) by [originally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally). 



> This story is a remix of originally's [The Trees Remember](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2553545), written last year for [got_exchange](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com/). I loved this story when I first read it and thought it might be fun to do a remix that was completely lady-centric (I adored the bits with Ygritte and Melisandre in the original). Many thanks to Gehayi for beta-reading!

_Beneath the great tree, time stands still. Unless it flies, years and centuries spinning past in flashes of light and shadow._

_He has seen the beginning and the end, or what he thinks might be the end. **What might be, not what will be**. The roots twine around his limbs and the sap drips into his veins. Bloodraven is the tree and the tree is Bloodraven._

_His dreams are full of faces. Some of them he knows and others he does not. But they are all the faces of war--its glory and its poison alike. Bloodraven had always hated war, in spite of his prowess. It was the province of those too foolish to find other means to resolve their differences._

_As he watches, pieces fall into place, like the mosaics in Summerhall. A picture emerges from shards of memories, for the trees remember, they always remember._

_Except when they do not._

 

***

 

Visenya found her brother seated at the Painted Table, a battered book in his hands. "Is it time, then?" she asked, arms crossed across her chest.

 

Aegon looked up. There were shadows beneath his eyes, lines carved beside his mouth to make him look at least a decade older than his twenty and five years. "It will mean war."

 

"It will." Visenya nodded. "Possibly war for the rest of our lives. The petty-kings will not bend easily. We've already seen that."

 

"She saw it too," he said, flipping open the book to the page his finger marked. Visenya could only make out lines of spidery script in the familiar hand of Rhaenys the Scribe, after whom their younger sister had been named. Without her painstaking work, the prophecies of Aenar Targaryen's precious Daenys would have been forgotten within a generation. To prevent such a thing from happening, she and Aegon had even travelled to the Citadel in Oldtown to have the entire book copied and hidden away in the library there, though when Visenya spoke of Rhaenys, the grey-cloaked maesters had smiled and nodded, reserving their true attention only for her brother. For his sake alone, she kept her peace, but refused their offer to keep the original as well, and to Aegon's question afterward, said only that she trusted the men of the Citadel only as much as they trusted women.

 

"The greatest war," Aegon was saying now, "the war between light and dark, between ice and fire."

 

It had occurred to Visenya more than once that, whatever Daenys the Dreamer may have dreamt, it would not have been difficult to see that Valyria of old was as an overripe fruit, rotten at its core, and that it was only a matter of time before it fell. That it fell in a cataclysm of fire that swallowed it whole was, perhaps, one of the more useful portions of that prophecy, but overall she misliked the business. _It is easy to look to prophecy in hindsight, to claim the future is written, but surely men's actions come from within and one cannot read a man's mind as one does a book_.

 

"She saw a great many things, brother," Visenya finally allowed, "but my concern is for the present, not wars far in the future." _If they ever come_. She crossed to his side and leant against the massive table carved with the likeness of the continent, from the southern shores of Dorne to well beyond the Wall where even the Citadel's maps stopped. She looked up at Aegon. "You will conquer the Seven Kingdoms. That I do not doubt. But how do you mean to rule them?"

 

"If the kings would only bend the knee..."

 

"That is the easy path, and there are some who may take it." Dragons were a mighty weapon, after all, and Balerion alone would strike dread into the heart of any king foolish enough to resist them. "But what if they follow the Storm King?"

 

From the corner of her eye, she saw a raven land on the windowsill, though the Rookery was on the far side of the castle. No doubt one of the dragons had left scraps nearby. _Where dragons feed, a whole kingdom of scavengers will roost_. She might say the same for Aegon's nascent kingdom.

 

Aegon reached for her hand. "I will have you and Rhaenys to guide me, and Orys too. We will make a kingdom together, one strong enough to stand against the darkness."

 

His eyes, as ever, trained on the horizon. It was for Visenya to see the path ahead. And so she would, come what may.

 

***

 

The air smelled different in the North.

 

It was crisper, cooler, sharp with the scent of pine and snow. Small clouds of steam puffed forth from Silverwing's nostrils as Alysanne soared high above the tiny ribbon of the new Kingsroad, barely wide enough to fit a cart or two as it wended its way north of Winterfell. Jaehaerys was staying in the great castle of the Starks, as the king ought to do, but Alysanne had other business.

 

On their first night at Winterfell, she had found herself on the battlements beside one of the Black Brothers of the Night's Watch, a grizzled veteran of the Battle of Stonebridge where it was said the Mander ran red with blood of royalist and Poor Fellow alike. Alysanne remembered hearing of that battle as a child from her great-aunt Visenya. _Your father started this war and was too weak to finish it. Maegor's methods are not the best, but they are all we have, unless we mean to lose the Iron Throne altogether and leave my brother's great work undone_.

 

They had only stayed in Dragonstone for three years after the death of Alysanne's father, but during those years, she and Jaehaerys heard much about Aegon the Dragon's great work. Queen-Dowager Visenya had even shown them the book--its bindings tattered, the script fading--of Daenys the Dreamer's prophecies. There was a copy in the Citadel's library, she said, and Jaehaerys had vowed to read it and compare the two. _We must be sure the maesters haven't changed anything_. After the queen dowager died, however, their mother had fled with them to Storm's End, carrying Visenya's famed sword Dark Sister.

 

But it was a greater loss that led Jaehaerys to Septon Barth and created his own great work. After their uncle the king was found in a pool of blood on the Iron Throne itself, Queen-Dowager Alyssa brought Jaehaerys and Alysanne back to the newly built Red Keep, and Jaehaerys was crowned within a fortnight with their mother and the new Hand Lord Baratheon by his side.

 

Alysanne was the one who first encountered Barth in the castle's library, where she was searching for a copy of _Fires of the Freehold_ , and he told her of the disappearance of Daenys the Dreamer's _Signs and Portents_ shortly after the death of Queen Visenya. Tears stood in his eyes as he spoke of a book more precious than anything he could contemplate, and she knew in that instant that she must introduce him to her brother. Strangely enough, however, it wasn't the prophecies of Daenys that had drawn tears from Barth's eyes, but rather the loss of a piece of history. And he turned Jaehaerys from dreams and prophecies to the realm itself. Aegon the Dragon's great work mattered little, he said, when the smallfolk starved under the iron rule of his sons.

 

It had been Barth, too, who had urged Jaehaerys to learn his realm anew from the Wall to the mountains of Dorne, and to build the Kingsroad so those without dragons might just as easily travel the continent. _That is, perhaps, an overstatement_ , observed Alysanne as she gazed down from Silverwing's back. But there was time enough for improvements.

 

And while she had given the Night's Watch very little by her reckoning, it was still, as Septon Barth would have said, better than nothing. The funds for a new castle to replace the horror of the Nightfort, paid out of her jewels. As the Wall receded from view behind her and she gazed out at the spread of wilderness below, however, another idea came to her.

 

Jaehaerys was waiting in the godswood before the great heart tree at Winterfell when Silverwing landed, her wings teasing at the red-leafed branches. Before her brother could even kiss her in greeting, Alysanne held out her hands and said, "I have a grand idea."

 

"More terrifying words were never spoken," replied Jaehaerys with a grin. "What would you do, my queen?"

 

"The Night's Watch is faltering, my lord, for waning numbers and too many expenses. I did what I could for them there, but surely we can do more."

 

He looked perplexed for a moment, and she took the chance to speak further, this time in hushed tones that only he could hear. "You see, I have not forgotten our grandsire's great work. It is the Night's Watch who must guard us from what lies beyond the Wall. Not simply the wildlings, but darkest winter itself. It is our duty, my lord, to arm them as best we can."

 

In the end, Lord Stark was convinced to part with fifty leagues of land as a gift to the Night's Watch, and Alysanne could turn back south, her heart light with accomplishment.

 

Septon Barth would be proud of them all, and Jaehaerys' great work would be on par with Aegon's when the maesters wrote the realm's history. It would be their legacy.

 

***

 

"This is what comes of treason. I hope you're satisfied," spat Rohanne, first of Tyrosh, then Blackfyre. _And now what?_ Her lands were forfeit, her children made beggars in exile, seeking refuge in her father's court---the same court she'd left in triumph some twelve years earlier. "We were content, Daemon and I, before you started pouring your poison in his ears."

 

All of Bittersteel's venom seemed to have drained from him after the catastrophe of Redgrass Field. He slumped in the chair, barely moving as it rocked from side to side with the ship's swaying. Beside him was the greatsword Blackfyre, from which Daemon had taken his name, and which had been granted to him by King Aegon on the day he knighted him and acknowledged him before the realm as his son. After Daemon fell, pierced by dozens of arrows with their twin sons beside him, Bittersteel had taken up the sword in a last, desperate charge, all to no avail.

 

"My sons are dead. My husband is dead." Grief made Rohanne's voice raw. " _Ten thousand men_ gone to their graves, Aegor, and for what?"

 

"He was the rightful king--"

 

"Was he?" Rohanne demanded. "Do you believe it, Aegor, or was it just your vanity?"

 

Something of Aegor Rivers sparked in those Targaryen eyes. "Not just my vanity. Your husband took up Blackfyre himself to war against that weakling on the Iron Throne."

 

"He would never have done it had it not been for you. You and your ambition, your warmongering. Did your feud with Bloodraven mean so much to you that you would rip the Seven Kingdoms apart for it? If so, my congratulations," she added, wishing her words were daggers, "on a job well done."

 

"Done, done, done," echoed the raven perched in the cabin window. Around its leg was a roll of parchment. With another glare at Bittersteel, Rohanne cut the message loose and read it.

 

"The _king_ ," she lingered on the title just to see Bittersteel's face darken with rage, "has stripped Houses Reyne and Peake of their privileges for backing Daemon. He has vowed to do the same to any other lord who supported the Black Dragon."

 

"They'll join us in exile, then. We'll be revenged on him."

 

"Not we. _You_ do as you like. I'm done with you. I will not let you butcher any more of my children."

 

"Your sons may disagree," snapped Bittersteel. "When they do, my lady, they will know where to find me."

 

In the weeks and months that followed, Rohanne told herself that he was wrong. As her remaining boys grew up in her father's court, surrounded by music and finery and glorying in it, she even began to believe that he might be happy in Tyrosh while Bittersteel warred in the Disputed Lands and sickness picked off the remaining Targaryens one by one back in Westeros. _We are free of it and free of them_ , she told herself.

 

That was before the ravens began to arrive again from across the Narrow Sea, singing their songs of death and glory and the Iron Throne for House Blackfyre, and she cursed each of them. For Blackfyres, it seemed contentment was never enough.

 

***

 

Jenny's childhood had been happy enough. She spent her nights sleeping beneath a weirwood and her days creeping amongst the ruins of Oldstones. Sometimes she spoke to old King Tristifer who had died so long ago. More often, she spoke to the ghosts.

 

In her dreams, they spoke back to her, or at least she thought they did at first. As she grew older, she realised that what she saw had little to do with Oldstones, and that the old man who watched beneath the tree in her mind was not King Tristifer but someone else entirely, with one red eye and a birthmark like a bird's wing upon his cheek.

 

The smallfolk thought her gods-touched and simple. Some even whispered that she was a witch, but Jenny knew better. Had she need of coin, she might have sold possets and potions as a wise-woman, but she lived happily enough on her own. At least she did until she met Cloris.

 

The woods-witch's head scarcely came to Jenny's thigh, her eyes as red as the one-eyed dreamer beneath the great tree. Though her hair was brightest white, her skin was the colour of oak bark. "You must come with me," Cloris said, "to the old circle. There will you find your true path."

 

And so they left Oldstones, Jenny gazing back over her shoulder as the ruins disappeared round the bend of the road, and started southward. They avoided the Kingsroad--clogged with travellers in these parts--and crossed the Red Fork by way of a ferryman who made a sign against evil when he saw Cloris.

 

The old circle was at the crest of an enormous hill. Though there were only stumps left of the massive weirwoods that had once stood there, the ground seemed to hum beneath Jenny's bare feet. And as she looked from stump to lonely stump, another eye seemed to open within her mind, and she _saw_.

 

_A godswood and a heart tree, not weirwood but oak, its slashes deep but somehow not real. She saw Cloris standing beside an unfamiliar, pale young woman in fine clothing of black and red, jewels dripping from her neck and wrists. "From your line," Cloris said, "will be born a great hero, the last hero, destined to drive back the Long Night and the darkness to come."_

_"You are certain of this?" the young woman asked, twisting the heavy jewelled chain between her fingers. On it was a pendant, a three-headed red dragon inlaid on black._

_Cloris' smile was not a smile, and Jenny shivered. "Nothing is certain, Your Grace," she replied. "I speak only of what I see, and the trees never lie."_

 

Jenny blinked and was back in the circle of stumps, Cloris beside her. "The trees never lie?" she echoed.

 

"No, they don't," said the woods-witch. "It is men who lie."

 

_When Jenny opened her eyes again, she stood beside a great weirwood tree, its leafless branches reflected in a pool. Steam rose from the water, though snow blanketed the tree's roots and the ground. Another woman, this one dark-haired and wearing a fur-lined cloak, sat beside the pool and gazed at her reflection. In her hands was a crown of what Jenny realised were dried blue winter roses._

_When she looked up, Jenny saw that she was a girl, younger even than she was. The girl looked at the heart tree's face. "Tell me what to do," she begged. "I don't know what to do."_

_A voice that was both Cloris' and not whispered through the bare branches. "There is power in your blood, Lyanna Stark. It is for you to decide how to wield that power."_

 

Another flash, and Jenny saw the girl--Lyanna Stark--lying on a bloodstained bed, the air filled with the smell of roses and death. When she opened her eyes, she looked at Cloris. "I don't want to see anymore."

 

"You must see, Jenny. You can save them all, but only if you look and only if they listen."

 

She saw a palace in flames, green and poisonous, heard a woman's scream and the cry of a newborn babe. "No, no. It's too much. I _can't_."

 

"You are strong, Jenny. Stronger than you think. The trees never lie and you can trust them. You can trust _me_ ," Cloris said. "I will be with you, to guide you."

 

Jenny nodded, wrapping her arms around herself. "Can we leave this place now?"

 

Cloris nodded, and Jenny stepped out of the circle. The humming faded to the sound of woods, crickets chirping and birds singing. Her heartbeat slowly stopped pounding.

 

"Are you lost, my lady?"

 

It was a man's voice from the tiny, nearly invisible path that picked its way up the hill. Something in his face reminded her of the fine lady in her vision, but she couldn't pin down what until she saw the red dragon picked out on his breast.

 

"I am no lady," she murmured, dropping to her knees. "Your Grace."

 

"No, please don't," he said. Before Jenny could speak again, he took her hands and raised her to her feet. "Who _are_ you?"

 

"Jenny of Oldstones," she heard herself say as she met his eyes. They were darker than blue, almost violet. "My name is Jenny of Oldstones."

 

***

 

Catelyn was feeding baby Robb when the great shadow of Winterfell appeared on the horizon. It was fully half a day before they arrived at the gates, the castle's walls looming larger as they grew closer. _How will I ever find my way here?_ She knew Riverrun like the back of her hand, every nook and cranny etched in her memory, but the castle of her birth could fit into a single courtyard in Winterfell.

 

They travelled well in advance of her new husband and the northern army, accompanied by Winterfell's maester and Lord Eddard's steward Vayon Poole. It was the steward who helped her out of the wheelhouse and led her to an enormous chamber in what he told her was the Great Keep. "You'll learn it all soon enough, my lady."

 

From the window, she could see an enormous godswood just past several other buildings, its leaves only beginning to sprout. The Riverlands were already in bloom when she left, and it seemed that spring had followed her north. _A good omen for King Robert's reign_ , Lord Mallister had said when she stopped in Seagard, _and for your son_.

 

For a castle of its size, Winterfell was strangely quiet. "Most of the men rode south to war, my lady," Vayon Poole explained over breakfast the next day when Catelyn remarked upon it. Aftereward, as they sat in Catelyn's chamber with Robb, his wife Freya offered to draw up a list of northern ladies suitable to attend Catelyn as Lady of Winterfell, and the very thought had made Catelyn burst into tears.

 

"My lady, what's wrong?" asked Freya Poole, taking Catelyn's hands. "Are you well?"

 

Catelyn bit her lip and forced back the tears. "I just...my sister was always with me before." She wondered if Lysa had reached the Eyrie yet. _She must be so lonely there_. At least Catelyn had Robb for company. Lysa's moon blood had come instead of the child she'd so longed for, and she'd wept inconsolably when Catelyn left Riverrun.

 

"Oh, my lady." The steward's wife wrapped her arms around Catelyn. "Of course you must miss her. But you'll come to love it here. We all do." She had the same Northern accent as her husband.

 

"Where's the sept?" Catelyn asked. As soon as the words left her mouth and she saw the puzzled expression on Freya's face, the truth hit her like a blow. _They don't have septs in the North_. The tears threatened her again.

 

"Would you like to visit the godswood, my lady?" asked Freya softly. "It's a lovely place, and peaceful." She took Robb from Catelyn's arms and led her down the stairs, chattering about berries and winter roses in the glass gardens hard by the godswood. Catelyn only half-listened, wondering how to pray without a sept, wondering if the gods would even hear her so far away from home.

 

They left the Great Keep through a covered bridge that Freya said led to the castle's armory, and Catelyn noted the largely empty racks and shelves that she imagined must have been filled with swords, spears, and shields when all of Winterfell's men-at-arms were here. Freya led her through a door into the courtyard and pointed at a two-storey building directly across from where they stood. "The guesthouse, my lady," she said, before walking toward a gap in the walls where Catelyn could see nothing but trees beyond.

 

Freya came to a halt at the wall. "I'll make sure no one disturbs you, my lady." Robb had dozed off in the crook of her arm and she gazed down at him with a doting smile. "I'll find you if he wakes, but my mam always told me to let sleeping babes lie."

 

"Do you have children of your own, Mistress Poole?"

 

"Not yet, my lady, but the gods willing they'll come soon. We've only been married these three years and there's plenty of time."

 

Catelyn's womb had quickened within a fortnight of her marriage, and until the Battle of the Trident, she had wondered what might happen if the Targaryens won and she found herself pregnant with a traitor's child. _But that didn't happen_ , she reminded herself, and she had her precious Robb. _The heir to Winterfell_.

 

Silence fell like a curtain as Catelyn entered the godswood, though most of the trees were still winter-bare. She shivered a little, drawing her cloak closer around her as she followed a path that barely merited the name until she found herself in front of an enormous heart tree with the beginnings of red leaves budding along its white branches. Before it was a pool of still black water, tiny tendrils of steam rising from the surface.

 

The weirwood's eyes seemed to look right through her. Catelyn swallowed and sank to her knees as though she were before the Mother's altar back in Riverrun. But the words dried up in her throat. _How do I speak to a tree?_

 

Instead she closed her eyes, hands clasped beneath her chin, and listened to the whistle of the wind through the branches. It _was_ peaceful, in its own way. One could almost forget there was an entire enormous castle just beyond the trees. The godswood in Riverrun had been too small for any such pretence.

 

A twig snapped and Catelyn's eyes opened. There was a woman standing before the heart tree, with long dark hair, clad in what looked like a nightshift.

 

"Who are you?" whispered Catelyn. "What are you doing here?"

 

When the woman turned, her grey eyes were full of grief that aged her young face. _She looks like Lord Stark_ , Catelyn realised with a start. For a moment, she thought she heard a girl's voice on the breeze. _I'm so sorry. So sorry. So sorry_.

 

A raven's cry pierced the air, and Catelyn started. When she looked back at the tree, there was nobody there.

 

_I'm imagining things_. But her skin was crawling and the godswood seemed full of eyes, all of them on her. _I don't belong here_. She scurried along the path as quickly as she could and was nearly out of breath by the time she emerged from the gate.

 

Freya Poole was deep in conversation with another woman whose skin was unusually dark, and who held a babe of her own in her arms.

 

Catelyn cleared her throat. "Mistress Poole, who is this?"

 

Freya lowered her eyes, visibly uncomfortable. "This is Wylla, my lady. She's a wet-nurse."

 

"A wet-nurse?" echoed Catelyn. "I have no need of a wet-nurse, but I thank you, Mistress Wylla."

 

"Oh, not for the little lord, my lady," replied Wylla. She had a peculiar accent that Catelyn could not place. "For..."

 

Before she could finish, Catelyn had moved to her side, looking down at the babe in her arms. Robb's hair had been fair when he was born and was slowly darkening to Tully red, but the child Wylla carried had hair black as the pool below the heart tree. He opened his eyes and they were grey as ice. Grey as her husband's.

 

Catelyn swallowed. "Whose child is this?"

 

Wylla had the grace to look down. "Lord Stark's, my lady. His name is Jon Snow."

 

A bastard. She was scarcely married and her husband had a bastard son. She wanted to demand who his mother was, why he was here. _A wet-nurse won't know those things_. Freya Poole took her arm and started to lead her away, but Catelyn kept glancing back over her shoulder.

 

"Did you know about this?" Catelyn demanded when they were out of earshot. "Did you know that my husband had a bastard son?"

 

"They arrived a few months back, my lady, on Lord Eddard's orders. From Dorne. Wylla's to go back once the babe is weaned."

 

"Is she his mother?"

 

"Nobody knows who his mother is. A Dornishwoman, I must think. You know what they say about them."

 

There had been a rumour from the grand tourney at Harrenhal that they had missed, a story Catelyn had stubbornly ignored, about her then-betrothed Brandon Stark and a sister of the Sword of the Morning, Lady Ashara Dayne. _But what if it wasn't Brandon?_

 

"My lady?" Freya was looking at her with concern. "It's in the past, my lady. Jon is older than Lord Robb. No doubt his mother dallied with Lord Stark before you were even married. You mustn't let it trouble you."

 

"I think you've said enough, Mistress Poole." Catelyn took Robb from her arms and winced as he gave a sharp cry at being awakened. "I'll find my own way back."

 

She would make her own way as lady of Winterfell.

 

***

 

The only time they let her leave the tower is to visit the godswood, and even then she is surrounded by guards in the livery of the flayed man.

 

She is their lady, they tell her. Theon tells her she _must_ be their lady or they will flay her alive. But she knows better. _And they are already flaying me alive. Just slowly, bit by bit_.

 

Arya Stark had sticks in her hair and knobbly knees and was a full four years younger. Arya Stark cared only for fighting and scrapping in the dirt. _My name is Jeyne. Jeyne Poole_.

 

"Lady Arya," one of the guards says, gesturing to the heart tree. "We're to bring you back when you're finished."

 

_I'm not Arya. I'm not. I'm not_. But the words clog her throat like stones. She wants to pray but she can't because she knows all too well that gods don't listen.

 

She prayed with Sansa when they took Lord Stark away, when they butchered her father on the staircase in the Tower of the Hand. She held Sansa's hand until the king's guards ripped her away, and then she prayed to the Mother for mercy.

 

She prayed over and over in the house where they kept her in King's Landing, and still the gods were silent. The Mother turned her face away. _Is it because this is a brothel? Does the Mother think I_ chose _this?_ Before she arrived there, she hadn't even known what a brothel was. She'd been taught to pray to the Seven in Lady Catelyn's sept and at Septa Mordane's knee, so she tried and tried, but the gods didn't listen while men beat and savaged her, leaving whipmarks upon her back and an endless pain where her heart once was.

 

When they dressed her in grey and white and put her on a horse to ride north, she thanked the Mother at first. _I thought I was going home. I thought I would be safe_. The war was over, they said, and she was going home to Winterfell.

 

But then she saw the flayed men on the once-familiar walls and she knew it was no god that had brought her here. No true god would have given her to Ramsay Bolton. The war may be over for the Lannisters in King's Landing, but it will never end for her.

 

Jeyne sinks to the ground before the heart tree and closes her eyes. _Gods, if you can hear me, just let me die. Let me die_.

 

If the gods are real, she tells herself, she will not rise.

 

Instead, the guards wrench her arms back and pull her to her feet. Through dull eyes, Jeyne looks at the heart tree. She has no more strength to weep, to protest that she never did anything wrong. The Mother never heard her, nor do the old gods.

 

Instead there are only men, and there is no mercy in them.

 

***

 

Dragons do not understand mercy, but Daenerys does.

 

She pardons Sansa Stark and makes her Lady of Winterfell, seeing in that girl's eyes an echo of the horrors she herself endured. She even pardons Margaery Tyrell, though she married three traitor kings.

 

_In order to rule_ , Missandei tells her, _you will need subjects_.

 

Gods are another story altogether. She dismounts from Drogon's back, her boots sinking into the snow. Behind her, the wall glistens in the winter sunlight and tiny icicles hang from Drogon's nose, making him sneeze.

 

Before her is a grove of white trees, red leaves clinging to the branches in spite of the snow. In their midst is a dark-haired boy who both resembles and does not resemble the formerly dead Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.

 

"Dragon Queen," says the boy. His eyes are centuries older than his face. "You must be ready."

 

"For what?" asks Daenerys. "The war is over. The Lannisters are dead and the lords of the Seven Kingdoms bow to me."

 

"The war has just begun," the boy replies. "Your family's war. Aegon the Dragon's war. The war of Light and Dark."

 

"You sound like Lord Snow."

 

The boy's smile flashes oh so briefly across his face and she catches a glimpse of what he must have once been. "He's seen it first hand. The dead walk and the shadows rise. You and he can stop them, but only if you believe."

 

Daenerys frowns. "Who are you?"

 

"I am the raven. I am the trees. I see all."

 

***

 

_The trees remember things as they happen, but they are not human, so they cannot connect them. What they recall are fragments, broken things out of joint. It is Bloodraven who connects them. A thousand eyes and one in truth as well as in song, he sees through the eyes of trees and ravens alike._

_In hindsight, all things make sense, but Bloodraven has no one to tell. Not yet. Not till the boy comes to him. And then..._

_Then he will win this war._

**Author's Note:**

> There is some [great meta on nobodysuspectsthebutterfly's Tumblr blog](http://nobodysuspectsthebutterfly.tumblr.com/post/147745919643/hi-buttertfly-some-questions-why-are-valyrians) about Aegon the Conqueror and his possible reasoning for choosing to seize control of Westeros rather than just being the lord of Dragonstone and sitting out the conflicts between the petty-kings. [She links it](http://nobodysuspectsthebutterfly.tumblr.com/post/121663037093/i-feel-like-this-is-kind-of-stupid-and-obvious-and) (quite convincingly) to the prophecy about the Prince Who Was Promised and points out the passage in _The World of Ice and Fire_ about the Targaryens not having a house sigil _until_ Aegon decided to conquer Westeros for his family. That's the interpretation I've decided to go with and I really like it.
> 
> Daenys the Dreamer's prophecies supposedly appear in a book titled _Signs and Portents_ , that was itself lost at some point, and is referenced in Archmaester Marwyn's _Book of Lost Books_. As a sucker for lost books, I couldn't help but bring that up.
> 
> Rohanne of Tyrosh is only mentioned in passing, that she married Daemon Blackfyre when he was 14 years old, and that she bore him seven sons and at least one daughter during their twelve years of marriage. After Daemon and the two eldest sons died at the battle of Redgrass Field, the remaining children fled to Tyrosh with Daemon's half-brother Bittersteel. Rohanne's fate isn't specified, but I'm assuming that she played a major role in her children's escape and their lives in Tyrosh.
> 
> For narrative reasons, we know next to nothing about Jenny of Oldstones and her woods-witch, who I'm interpreting here as a child of the forest and a greenseer.
> 
> We know that Jon Snow and the wet-nurse Wylla had already arrived at Winterfell and were settled there before Catelyn Stark arrived with Robb. Jeyne Poole is the same age as Sansa Stark, give or take, and since his wife (Jeyne's mother) is not named or mentioned in canon, I have given her a name.


End file.
